Notices by digital luciferase (resonancewright@infosec.exchange)

@dalias @futurebird
no, that's just the niche you've assigned me out of mental frustration.

I don't believe in a benevolent techno-bro post-singularity future; i think it's much more likely that we'll all be dead in fifty years than that we'll be holding hands all watched over by machines of loving grace.

One does not need to believe that nuclear weapons are a good thing to have understood that in the 1930s and 40s many governments were seeking them, that we have people still trying to build them today. I feel the same way about actual artificial intelligence. It may well come to kill us all and replace us atop the food chain.

You see, I believe that Fermi's Paradox points one way -- species likely do not survive their full technological sophistication. I think it's a lot more likely that the first alien intelligence anyone ever encounters will be fully synthetic.

No, i don't like it. But there it is.

@futurebird @dalias

I'm sure you saw the bit about Dawkins spending time with an LLM and announcing that he thinks it's actual intelligence somehow. To me, that illustrates the danger of approaching it as something that resembles the simulation of a human mind.

LLMs ARE the distillation of the human mind in a way. A rotgut, prohibition era, bathtub-gin type of distillation but there you have it. I think it's fundamentally more likely that we would decide non-intelligent actors are intelligent because they ape that model, when an actual generated intellect would be.... whatever it is.

We made gods in our image, too. We tend to understand our world via human metaphor.

There's a scenario for AI where no one recognizes what it is until it cannot be stopped, because people disregarded it at first as it didn't fit the image they had for AI.

I myself have the hopelessly subjective notion that if artificial general intelligence arises it will be under no particular urge to clue us in that it exists :)

@dalias @futurebird

no true scotsman, you say? :)

I would remind you that you were the one who chose to define AI as how it has been marketed to the masses. I don't think it's particularly useful, myself, but I won't quibble.

The Turing test remains the standard even though many people recognize the problem with it , not because it is flawless but precisely because there is no more objective workable definition in play.

That's the point.

For someone who insists that AI means what marketers say it means, you are now curiously and mysteriously deaf as to what they say about the Turing Test. But at least you're harking back to what AI researchers are actually saying now instead of Madison Avenue.

@dalias @futurebird

...not at all. the most common definition scientists apply to an artificial intelligence is one that is hopelessly subjective -- passing a Turing test. No one is making an 'if than' argument to substantiate ai, they are making the 'walk and talk like a duck' argument. Most know it can't be objectively defined by us, or at least, we haven't figured out how to do it yet.

The rest of your post seems quite vehement, like you want to fight about something; best of luck with those sentiments, whatever they ultimately are, once rendered noncombative and speaking in normal tones. If they are meant to convey a profound distrust of the technologies that people try to use to replace workers, you are wise -- but that alone won't stop them, nor will insisting that it's all the same hype thing.

@dalias @futurebird

if we are what marketers say we are, we're doomed.

I myself do not think they are the arbiters of reality, but I won't stop you if you do. It is certain that people constantly market 'smart' featured things as AI, when not even LLM features actual intelligence.

I have to say instead that I don't really GAF what they make of things, though, or what gullible people decide they must mean.

I think one can be two different things at the same time -- entirely skeptical of the current crop of businesses and products that are hyping the 'intelligence' of what they are offering for sale, and simultaneously cognizant that a true autonomic general intelligence will be a very different beast altogether.

@futurebird at the risk of dorksplaining a pedantic nonpoint, we really need to stop calling these LLMs AI. I agree that they aren't the next big thing. They also aren't AI.

the larger point i have in mind is that we aren't done with the AI phase, just one of its preliminaries.

generally speaking it is impossible to believe in heaven, but anyone can understand why we'd come up with the idea.

on the other hand, it takes a certain kind of twisted screwhead to come up with the concept of hell.

yet even though i fancy myself a fair minded person, in 2026 two things are true: I cannot believe in the concept of a heaven, and we have people in office that nevertheless give me hope that hell exists

@patrickcmiller 🤡

@patrickcmiller “The House Always Wins” 😆